Legends of Equestria News: Bronycon and Open Server Weekend

Legends of Equestria

How's everyone doing today? It's me, Enigma Sage, coming to you live from the swirling, primordial mists of the Equestria Gaming of yesteryear, and I'm here to bring you some fresh LoE news.

For those of you headed to Bronycon this weekend, the team behind the ever-popular MMO Legends of Equestria will be there to showcase the game's latest developments in their panel on August 7. In addition, the team will be hosting one of their trademark Open Server Weekends August 14-16 so you can test out these additions for yourself. For more info, head on over to their website, or check out their announcement after the break.

My Little Karaoke: Beta Channel

My Little Karaoke

 Last night, the team behind My Little Karaoke - an UltraStar song pack chock-full of brony music and other things, and pretty much the only thing in our karaoke tag - released a new update. Unlike previous updates, this one contains no new songs, but instead is focused on the game itself, moving to a brand-new launcher and engine with support for things like online leaderboards, duet songs, and a system to facilitate quicker song releases. Check their release post for more information.

- RedEnchilada

Demo: HorseGame

HorseGame Demo

 Hey, remember that HorseGame thing we posted about earlier? Well, the team at EquiDev has now released the demo for public consumption, which can be downloaded from their site. It contains one playable area with a variety of enemies, collectibles and spells to entertain oneself with. I've already said all about the game that I can in the last article, so I'll cut straight to the chase and post their announcement below the break.

HorseGame demo trailer and new website

HorseGame

After around a year and a half of development, the team at Equidev (formerly SprakleDev) finally has a new update concerning a new public demo of their project, HorseGame. For those unaware, HorseGame is a 3D platformer inspired by games like Ratchet and Clank, wherein you play as an unnamed unicorn and fight off enemies with various attacks and spells.

 While the demo itself isn't quite out yet, the dev team did send us this trailer to post, as well as an announcement to share, which I've placed just past the page break. Read on for more about the project and the demo!

Legends of Equestria hosting yet another open server test

Legends of Equestria

 For those who haven't been following updates on the game's site, the Legends of Equestria team will be running an open server weekend this January, from the 24th to the 26th, to test a new server system. Just about any comment I could make about the game has already been said, so check out their news post on their site or below the break.

My Little Karaoke: Additional Content Disc #3

My Little Karaoke

 For the third time in a row, the My Little Karaoke team has released a new batch of songs for aspiring horsefamous singers to destroy their vocal cords to. If you've seen this project before, you'll know what to expect; if you haven't, it shouldn't be hard to guess. Like always, the new pack can be downloaded from the project's official site, and the listing of new tracks will be copied below the break.

Poképon early alpha release

Poképon

 This one's been sitting in the inbox for a little bit while some preparations were made for the post. Poképon, made by Silverweed91, is a Pokémon-styled battle simulator featuring various ponies and other characters from the FiM universe. The current early release is a little barebones and unstable, but battling and teambuilding over the internet are fully supported. The game takes inspiration from Pokémon Showdown in its presentation and layout, for an easy transition for anyone used to that interface.

 A download link is available on the game's site, and the source code is located at the game's GitHub repository. Since there's no official game server running, I've set one up on my VPS; to connect, set the IP to lyrawearspants.com and the port to its default. There may not be anyone ready to battle when you connect; in that case, simply wait around for someone to show up.

- RedEnchilada

Horse Game and more at BronyCAN 2014

Horse Game

 The development team behind Horse Game, a 3D game about... something, will be hosting a panel at BronyCAN 2014 next weekend. The Horse Game panel begins at 3PM on Saturday, and will feature the developers as they (as described in the press release) showcase gameplay, detail the development process, and explain their goals for where this project will lead.

 Pre-registration for the event closes tonight at midnight, for those interested in attending. Other games present include Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder, which will be on sale in the dealers' hall, and Legends of Equestria.

- RedEnchilada

Legends of Equestria running an open server weekend

Legends of Equestria

 We already posted about this when the announcement was made, but Legends of Equestria, the most well known horse MMO in the fandom, is hosting an open server this weekend to live out all of your romping around and boundary-escaping fantasies in. They've now put the client up for download, and the servers will be going up soon if they aren't already. Check out their news post for more information, or read the important bits mirrored below the break (as their site servers always seem to go down often during open servers).

Review: Derpy & The Hunting of the Super Tasty Muffin (of Awesomeness)

Derpy & The Hunting of the Super Tasty Muffin (of Awesomeness)

Now if that title doesn't make you want to play this game, I don't know what will. Derpy & The Hunting of the Super Tasty Muffin (of Awesomeness) is a graphic text adventure made by PonyDreamStudios that will most likely entertain you with all its open possibilities and silly situations. The game is currently in Beta, but the main story is already completed.

New Megamare X trailer

 Megaman being one of my favorite series, I GOT HYPE from this one. Toasty Justice sent in the showcase trailer for Megamare X from EFNW 2014, and it's looking like the project is making good progress. "Now featuring Mech-suits, new enemies, intense platforming, vigorous challenges, and more to come!" he says? Well, count me in!

 Get the trailer above; if you want to follow the project, you can do so on twitter, tumblr, deviantArt, and their website. Also, apologies to Toasty Justice for being a little slow on posting.

- ApocalypseUndone

Play Legends of Equestria in August

 Since I'm guessing that most of you people have already participated in one of Legends of Equestria's many open server weekends and pretty much know what to expect, there's not much for me to say aside from that it'll begin at 12:01 AM EST on August 8th and end at 11:59 PM on the 10th, and that you will need an account on their forums in order to participate in the usual mixture of general chat, roleplay, and enterprising young chaps finding increasingly convoluted ways to leave the confines of the map. Not the sort of thing that I usually enjoy, but it's not like I really have much for friends to play LoE with, so I usually just run around as a lowly mudpony and quit shortly after reaching that one really high spot just outside the lawyer-friendly city of Cantermore.

In case you wish to read the original announcement for whatever reason, you may do so at http://forum.legendsofequestria.com/index.php?topic=11989.0

- Tuxxy

My Little Karaoke: Additional Content Disc #2

My Little Karaoke

Last week, the crew behind My Little Karaoke - a song pack and modification for UltraStar for singing along with various pony songs - released a new content disc. The expansion provides a total of over 90 new songs according to the developers, including foreign language versions of a few official songs for you to improvise nonsensical lyrics over, as well as a bunch of brony music of... varying quality. (I liked a couple of them, anyway.) The update also comes with a new visual identity for the project.

You can find the download here, although the individual ZIP downloads of songs are no longer available, leaving the only option to download the entire 2GB ISO (which they seem insistent on using, as opposed to other, more sane archive formats for digital downloads like this) and extract the songs you want. The prior downloads have to be installed for an automatic installation to work, although nothing's stopping you from pulling the songs themselves into a custom UltraStar installation.

Read past the break for the list of new songs in this release.

Fallout Equestria: the Unblinking

The Overmare Studios

 Now that The Overmare Studios has released this new Fallout: Equestria preview, I can kind of understand why their previous videos used a first-person perspective: their current pony model looks surprisingly creepy when animated, especially with those large, unblinking eyes. Come to think of it, it feels like there's something a bit off with almost all of the animations, although I can't quite lay my finger on it. Perhaps it's just because the animations are incomplete, or maybe this is actually a surreal horror game and Littlepip is an android who happens to fall into the uncanny valley. It's already scarier than Dead Space, so why stop there when you can go all the way down?

 They're also recruiting, and since I don't feel like pasting their ad below the break this time you can read about their requirements at http://theovermare.com/blog/2014/04/flow-of-animations.

Ponykart Looking for 3D Modelers

Ponykart

 Work on the Ponykart C++ port seems to be progressing smoothly, if at a rather slow pace, but it seems that they still have a shortage of 3D modelers (a problem seemingly shared by many FOSS games). The fandom does seem to have a distinct lack of those as well, sadly, but if you happen to have some experience with 3DS Max and/or Blender and would like to contribute to the community in some way or another, this is probably an almost perfect opportunity for you to get some practice and should look pretty good on your résumé.

 I wasn't told exactly where interested applicants were supposed to apply for the position, so you might as well just do so at the recruitment thread if you feel like it, which can be found at http://ponykart.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=dqbg1ss4oeajnblv8k3b5g44f0&topic=52.

- Tuxxy